Month: September 2026

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of massive galaxy cluster MACS J0417 (left of center) on Sept. 19, 2026. This galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying light from objects far behind it. Supernova Athena, discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2025, is predicted to reappear between now and…

Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum extent on Sept. 12, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The ice covered an estimated 1.78 million square miles (4.6 million square kilometers), tying 2008, 2010, and 2025 for the 10th-lowest minimum in the satellite record.…

Shannon Lucid’s Record-Setting Mission Aboard Mir  Three days before returning to Earth, Shannon W. Lucid—who joined NASA in 1978 as one of its first six female astronauts—checked in on wheat growing in the Svet greenhouse aboard the Russian space station Mir. For six months, Lucid lived and worked alongside two Russian cosmonauts conducting life science…

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit around Earth on Sept. 19, marking another new milestone for an observatory that continues to transform our understanding of the universe. Hubble has traveled more than 5 billion miles around Earth over its 36-year lifetime, exceeding 1.7 million total observations. An observation completed on the day of…

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 23 – A… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. AfterBefore A…

Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Planner and Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University New Brunswick, NB, Canada Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 11, 2026 This week we had two planning days (Tuesday and Friday), as Monday was Labor Day in North America, where many of the Curiosity team are based. Labor Day (the first Monday in September) marks…

NASA’s Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer formed a working group in August 2026 to review the most recent data related to extravehicular activity (EVA) prebreathe testing and decompression sickness (DCS) events, venous thromboembolism (VTE) in-flight occurrences, and patent foramen ovale (PFO) implication as they relate to NASA’s Artemis (lunar and beyond) missions.…

NASA-supported scientists have discovered an organism that lives at extreme temperatures previously thought impossible for complex life. High temperatures can cause the destruction of necessary cell components, which is a big problem for cells with complex parts like a nucleus encasing delicate genetic information. In the heated waters of California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park, a…

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, researchers found mysterious objects that give off unusually low-energy X-rays but intense levels of ultraviolet radiation. One of the galaxies they studied, M101, is pictured here in this image released on Sept. 9, 2026. Astronomers suggest these newly spotted objects in other galaxies may help solve not one, but two…

Editor’s Note: This feature was updated Sept. 22, 2026, to note the time change for the in-flight call with students.  Students in New Hampshire will hear from NASA astronaut Anil Menon as he answers prerecorded STEM questions while aboard the International Space Station. The Earth-to-space call will begin at 11:40 a.m. EDT Thursday, Sept. 24, and…

The tilt in Earth’s axis of rotation makes the apparent position of continents shift with the seasons in imagery from a NASA camera in deep space.

Depending on your locale, equinoxes can be seen as harbingers of longer nights and gloomy weather, or promising beacons of nicer temperatures and more sunlight. Observing and predicting equinoxes is one of the earliest skills in humanity’s astronomical toolkit. Many ancient observatories around the world observed equinoxes along with the more pronounced solstices. These days,…